The secret sauce of lean leadership

Lean Nation,

I have been very blessed in my life.  I have worked for and with many companies.  Some were large and some were small.  Some were publicly traded and some were private.  Some were union and some were non-union.  Some were high tech with new products coming to market and lots of automation and some companies were low tech with lots of labor.  But most importantly, some had great leadership and some had atrocious leadership.  I am now convinced that every job was a stepping stone to something better, even though I couldn't see it at the time.

This is a lean blog, though, and I am pretty sure no one cares about my work history.  But I took two important learning's away from this experience. The signs had always been there, but they were never clear. The signs were solidified about a month ago in a conversation with a 40 year lean veteran.  I asked him what are the keys to creating a culture of improvement .  He said unequivocally the key is leadership.

I asked him to be more specific.  He said leadership needs two skills to be successful at improvement. The first is not a surprise.  He said that leaders need to hold everyone accountable to follow standard work.  This means staff and management.  This means "special" employees like physicians and engineers, and lawyers. And this means leadership like directors, chiefs and vice presidents.

I see in many organizations that the staff is held accountable. But the further you get from the staff,  the less accountability there is.  This creates many problems, but most notably, lack of leadership standard work drives the majority of the waste in the system.

The second leadership skill is the ability to create a tangible vision.  While lean at its most fundamental, is about seeing and eliminating waste, sometimes the entire system is so wasteful, it needs to be totally re-designed.  While many leaders agree with this statement, many fail to act in any meaningful way.  The risk of failing is too great.  The culture change too large. We will upset people.  This has worked in the past. Look how we benchmark....The list goes on.

One way this plays out is the creation  a fuzzy strategy, with unattainable or un-measurable goals. The lower levels of management, in an attempt to meet the strategy, embark on multiple and frequently competing initiatives. This results in limited improvement, poor results, and lots of frustration.

Great lean organizations have a clear vision and strategy.  There is no guessing on the approach, measures or expectations.  And they don't dodge the unpopular issues, sacred cows, or silo-ed organizational structures. There are no untouchable employees.  Everyone participates and every is accountable.  Transformation is the goal.

So looking back on my career and my consulting practice, I can attest that every transformation that failed was because of a gap in one of the two leadership skills. Either the accountability framework was not in place, or leadership did not have the courage to create the correct and clear vision leading to sub-optimal results and no culture change.

How's your transformation going?

Lean Blessings,

Ron

Ron Bercaw
President and Sensei
Breakthrough Horizons Ltd.
www.breakthroughhorizons.com
2 time Shingo award winning author

Are your internal lean experts excelling?

Lean nation,

Today's blog will review an important lesson.  If you have read any of my blogs in the past, your will quickly recognize this theme.  About 1/3 or more of my blogs focus on this topic.  Have you guessed it yet?

Leadership

I was teaching a Master's class at the University of Toronto, and an adjunct this week on healthcare quality improvement.  I had a class of some the best and brightest minds in healthcare including a blend of physicians, clinicians, and administrator's.  It is inspiring that our next generation of healthcare leadership is getting a grounding in lean quality improvement.

This class was an intense course.  4 days of  consecutive lessons.  I prefer teaching in that format since the concepts are progressive in their application and the back to back consistency enables better retention and application of the material.  The questions I received from the class were very interesting and an excellent gauge for what is happening within the healthcare industry.  As least as it relates to the students in the class. And this class was international in their make-up.

Would you be able to guess where the majority of questions came from?   Yes there were thee usual list of questions related to tools and their application.  The concepts students struggled the most with included the following:

• the application of takt time
• properly completing a time observation
• properly completing a loading diagram
• applying the scientific method through the A3, and 
• process control

Ironically, the broader issues with the class were not tool related at all.  There were leadership related.   As we talked through linking lean improvement to corporate strategy, removing the barriers to large scale organizational change,  dealing with accountability issues,  one theme became apparent.  Leadership in these students organizations were unclear of their roles,  or not engaged in the improvement process at the level required to be successful.  

All of the major issues that need to be resolved to transform an organization must be dealt with directly by senior leadership.  This topic dominated the class from the first through the fourth day.  I had to spend a lot of time addressing the leadership aspects of each of the change concepts. More time was spent talking about the tricks to get leadership's attention.

Let's go back to the title of this blog.  Are your lean improvement experts excelling in your organization?  If not,  the problem may not lie with the improvement team, it may lie with leadership.

Lean Blessings:

Ron

Ron Bercaw

President and Sensei

Breakthrough Horizons Ltd

www.breakthroughhorizons.com

Shingo award winning author

Directly Linking Improvement to Strategy

Lean Nation,

Happy Holidays to everyone!  As the holiday season unfolds, I wish everyone a prosperous and safe holiday season, and happy New year!  If you have worked hard to eliminate non-value added activity from your processes,  hopefully 2013 was full of many great surprises of improved quality, shorter lead-times, and improved productivity for your organization.  If you have yet to get started on your improvement journey, great things await you in 2014!

In my travels this December,  ran into a situation I frequently see within organizations. Many organizations have some form of improvement capability.  They have trained personnel with some basic understanding of tools and the application of the tools.  Less frequently, they might also have engaged leadership with a desire to change culture and improve. Both of these ingredients are important to delivering sustainable results.   However most organizations are hand-cuffed because of one critical leadership flaw. That flaw would be lack of focus.

One of the biggest problems I see in many, many, many..... organizations is they try to accomplish way too much. Leadership has failed to separate the many good ideas and initiatives from the critical few.  The specific lean approach to developing and deploying strategic initiatives is known as Hoshin Kanri, also known as policy deployment or strategy deployment.   This process delivers the critical few breakthrough objectives and provides a framework for developing, refining, deploying, and managing the organization to the delivery of breakthrough objectives directly derived from the strategic plan.  

There are many places to research Hoshin Kanri and several outstanding books are written on the topic. So I am not going to talk about strategy deployment in this blog. Others do a better job of speaking about the process and its benefits.  

Should your organization wish to pursue the process of Hoshin Kanri route, however, be warned.  If you are not willing to totally unwind your current strategic planning process, along with the corresponding operational and financial review processes,  then I would not take on Hoshin Kanri.  If you do, you will be managing two systems and the new one loses every single time. There is no hybrid approach that works effectively.  Either follow Hoshin Kanri standard work or don't,  but being half in and half out will be ineffective 

Now back to my blog content.  Specifically, the organization I was working with had several hundred trained improvement specialists.  Almost all of these personnel were part- time improvement people holding other full time jobs, but none-the-less this group had more than enough capacity to move some big dots. As a general rule, this multi-site organization had leadership committed to resourcing projects.

The challenge was that the organization has over 150 key measures to deliver improvement on. No one could articulate what the measures were, which were important, how they were measured.  So each team targeted a different measure or measures and although pockets of improvement existed,  no meaningful outcomes were generated. Why? Because there was never enough critical mass on anyone single focus to move a big dot. The work was scattered and diffused.  Teams were fighting for the same resources like IT and supply chain. And managers and leaders were constantly bickering over which project was more important. All of these activities are 100% waste. 

This is a self inflicted leadership wound.  I believe the single most important thing leadership can do is determine the priorities and focus of the organization.  Asking people to focus on, improve, and report on 150 items is criminal. (By the way, the second most important think leadership can do is hire the right people to do the work).

So the question is how many priorities should there be?  A world class organization has a total of 3-7 top level priorities. A lean organization will typically have 5 areas of focus. These areas of focus are directly aligned to true north measures.  True north measures point to the top level outcomes that the organization aspires to obtain that would lead to breakthrough performance as viewed by their customers. As a refresher, the true north measures include dimensions of Quality, Delivery, Cost, and Growth and since nothing happens without people,  another dimension, Human Development is added to the list.

The task of taking an organization from 150 areas of focus to 7 would be daunting and likely impossible in the first attempt.  Getting from 150 to 20 in the first pass might be possible and takes the organization quite a bit closer to their goal of 5-7.

Great organizations excel and move big dots because leadership clearly articulates and resources the critical few breakthrough strategies, provides oversight for their execution and takes quick interventions when things go off track.  This is how you directly link team level improvement to strategy.

Lean Blessings,

Ron

Ron Bercaw

President and Sensei

Breakthrough Horizons Ltd

www.breakthroughhorizons.com

Shingo Award winning author

Getting Senior Leadership Engaged in Lean Improvement

Lean Nation,

I have written many times about the necessity of senior leadership to be "leading" lean enterprise transformation.  I have several posts in this blog and I have several chapters in both of my books dedicated to this topic.  (Taking Improvement from the Assembly Line to Healthcare, and Lean Leadership for Healthcare).  Today's blog will bring another lens to this topic.

I have discussed  that the key to long term sustainable success is getting leadership to think act and behave differently.  In fact check my previous post to review just that topic. So to have leadership begin to think act and behave differently,  you will need your leadership to (or if you are a leader) commit time and energy to the change process.  But what if your change initiatives are part of their time management problem? 

"Huh,  I thought we wanted leadership engaged." How is this possible. 

Many, many, many organizations falsely take a project approach to transformation.  This approach will fail every time.  You can not change an organization's culture by executing a series of projects.  As I have said repeatedly, organizations should pursue improvement along the lines of creating flow and pull, and designing products and services to be defect free along value streams.  Perform a value stream analysis along your key strategic core processes, and execute rapid cycle improvement to change the culture.  

So let's assume that my organization is engaged along the lines of improving four value streams.  A different value stream is running a kaizen event (or rapid cycle improvement) every week of the month.  This seems logical: level the improvement across the month.  From a process improvement perspective, this is ideal.  The workload is leveled across the month.  But from a leadership perspective this is not ideal.

Leadership is now required to be present at four kaizen kick-offs, be present at 3 team leader meetings each week, and attend four final report outs.  Under this format, I have frequently seen each leader assume another leader is present at the various activities, and the corresponding learning will be lost.  Additionally, attendance will begin to wane.  This can be mitigated with a schedule of which leaders need to attend what, but we are still limiting the learning. 

You might consider getting your organization on a rhythm of improvement. By getting on a rhythm lean organizations pick one or two weeks each month that become the designated improvement weeks.  In this format leadership can prepare , well in advance, to be present at the kick-off, daily team leader meetings and the report out.   No excuses.

If your leadership engagement is spotty, check your improvement rhythm.  Get on a cycle of improvement focusing on a single week each month.  I recommend you pick either the second or the third week each month.  Many organizations are usually distracted the first week of each month with month end close, and are distracted again at the end of the month meeting customer requirements for the month or the quarter.

If you can establish an improvement rhythm, you might see your leadership presence and engagement pick up.

Lean Blessings,

Ron

Ron Bercaw
President and Sensei
Breakthrough Horizons Ltd
www.breakthroughhorizons.com
Shingo Award Winning Author

Lean Leadership - Governance

Lean Nation,

Continuing on our leadership series, this week's post will focus on governance.    There are two levels of governance that should be addressed when trying to transform your organization; enterprise and value stream.  Let's discuss each in turn.

Enterprise Wide Transformation Governance

To effectively implement the Toyota Production System across the enterprise you need an effective steering committee.  The steering committee should be comprised of the key change agents across the organization.  This powerful guiding coalition can come from management and staff.   I recommend about 10 people to particpate on the committee. The enterprise steering committe is responsible for at least eight main areas.

1. managing the pace of change
2. selecting the right areas of focus
3. ensuring value stream improvement
4. ensuring standard work is followed for improvement
5. managing the communication plan
6. developing people (improvement capabilities of the organization)
7. managing the improvement measures (process and outcomes)
8. removing corporate barriers

Value Stream Governance

Each value stream will need to have a governance structure.  The value stream makeup will consist of the value stream manager, the key process owners, and support process owners, along with key leadership from staff.  This committee, is much smaller and may only include 3-5 people. I like to have the primary lean lead resource as a part of this team as well.  The value stream governance will be responsible for the following:

1. managing the value stream improvement plan (priorities and intensity)
2. ensuring everyone in the value stream is particpating in improvement
3. ensure improvements are sustained
4. ensure improvements are sustained
5. ensure improvements are sustained (get the picture)
6. follow up on variances from the visual management system
7. ensure resources are allocated to localize improvement
8. hold staff accountible to standard work

If you are not getting the results you are expecting from your improvement efforts,  check your governance structure.  If you are not providing effective (or any) goverance to your improvement efforts,  you likely are skipping some important steps in the transformation process leading to spotty and un-sutained results.

Lean Blessings,

Ron

Ron Bercaw
President, Breakthrough Horizons
www.breakthroughhorizons.com

Lean Leadership - Adressing "Antibodies"

Lean Nation;

This week's blog will focus on addressing antibodies.  Before we can get too far, we need to define what an antibody is.  An antibody is an individual that tries to preserve the status quo of an organization.  While that is the technical definition of an antibody,  let me provide a different definition.  An antibody is an individual that resists change.   Like antibodies get active in the human body when an infection is present to return the body to status quo,  so do antibodies get active in an organization when change is infused.

Individuals that resist change can be detrimental to the change process.  People that refuse to follow standard work, people that decide not to participate in improvement, and people that at extremes, even sabotage the efforts must be dealt with quickly and effectively.

So should we fire everyone that falls in this category?  Absolutely not.  Why are people resisting? This answer is multi-faceted.  Some people might not be clear on the reason for change, while others might not have been provided the opportunity to provide input in the changes. Another group didn't like the changes and is digging their heels in.

There are dozens of strategies to address antibodies, far beyond the few paragraphs compromising this blog.  I will provide a few common approaches you can utilize to help bring antibodies along.

1) Upfront, be sure to clearly communicate the reason for change and what is expected of all staff.  In the early stages, I am not usually concerend that everyone particpate in improvement. However, following standard work cannot be negotiated.  Standard work is the cornerstone of all improvement and everyone has to follow the work standards all the time.

2) Try to give opportunities for everyone to provide feedback to proposed changes.  It is easier to accept change if you have been communicated to and involved.  No one likes being changed. This is not alwasy possible, especially when you have a large organization spanning shifts or weekends.  Regardless, make every possible attempt to allow the team to give feedback on proposed changes while these changes are being developed and while these changes are being tested.

3) I find the best way to turn antibodies to champions is by getting them involved in the process.  Many team associates will be great advocates of lean and improvement once they have the opportunity to experience the complete PDCA cycle executed in a team environment.  Involvement = commitment.

4) Deal immediately and swiftly with those people who choose not to follow standard work.  This can range from a short talk to progressive discipline.  You will not sustain any of the teams hard work with a consistent commitment from the team to follow standard work.  Regrettably , after following steps 1-3 above, many managers fall short in step four leading to sub-standard results.

Antibodies are usually "bad" people.  Some staff will be filled with anxiety over any change and some staff will believe the change will cause the work and the corporation to fail, or be very difficult.  Anxiety usually goes away over time. 

However,  we need to have a strategy in dealing with antibodies since they will multiply if left unchecked. Antibodies that multiply will preserve the status quo which means no improvement, and no change in either perfromance or culture. A great lean leader anticipates that antibodies will be present and addresses the issues enabling greatness to occur.

Lean Blessings,

Ron

Ron Bercaw
President, Breakthrough Horizons
www.breakthroughhorizons.com

Creating Value - Where should we improve?

Lean Nation,

As part of our leadership series,  one of the questions we need to address is where to focus our improvement.  We have several choices to pick from.  We could focus on information flows;  scheduling, registration, order entry,  supply ordering, etc.  We could look at the value added activities.  Depending on the business you are in this could include design services,  manufacturing, clinical healthcare, distribution,  point of sale services, call center operations, etc.  We could also select from back shop processes including human resource management, finance and accounting activities, purchasing, organizational development, and customer service.  So where do we begin?

There are a few guidelines you can use to help you in your decision making.  First,  remember we always want to improve along a value stream.  As a refresher, a value stream is all the activities (good and bad) that deliver value to a customer.    When we improve along a value stream,  we will be improving both process/product and information flows. So choosing whether to begin with value added operations or information flows is a distinction we need not make.  we'll be improving both.

Now what about the distinction between value added operations versus back office operations.  Most organizations want o focus almost exclusively in the value added areas.  This is a great place to begin, and I encourage most organizations to begin in these areas.  So the question I believe we want to answer is when should we move into back office operations and is there a ratio of value added to back office improvement.

I prefer that we work within one back office value stream for every four value added streams.  Basically 80% value added operations to 20% back office.  You must get into the back office operations or you will start to slow the effectiveness of the value added improvement.  Examples include hiring the right people, having the right promotion criteria,  having effective employee relations and performance reviews, and ensuring accounting is value added to the rest of the operation.  I believe you can see how having poor back shop operations can negatively impact the your operation. Many organizations wait too long to start into the back office processes. 

To select the proper back office place to begin,  let that get pulled from your value stream improvement.  As you are improving your process/product and information flows,  you will discover which back office processes are impacting the improvement of your value added operations.  When you discover where to go, then go there.  Don't wait until you you get through all the value added areas or you will be too late.

Lean Blessings,

Ron

Ron Bercaw
President, Breakthrough Horizons
www.breakthroughhorizons.com

Lean Leadership - Management and Staff Development

Lean Nation,

One of the primary responsibilities of leadership during a performance and cultural transformation is to develop management and staff.  Why does the management and staff need to be developed? Likely many habits exist within your organization.  These habits show up in actions that occur daily.  An organization really shows its colors when it is placed under stress. 

Is lean thinking exhibited, or are traditional solutions employed when problems surface.  Even if you are in years 3, 4, or 5 of your improvement journey,  when stressed you will consistently see non-lean solutions to problems encountered.  Hiring extra people, ordering additional resources, working overtime,  inspecting in quality problems,  purchasing extra equipment, etc.  The list goes on.

Does an A-3 get opened, or an A-4?  Do we practice kaizen?  Is our approach to eliminate waste in lieu of adding resources?  This is how a lean organization would respond. A kaizen week, for example,  might eliminate hiring a new staff member that could take up to six weeks.

Our goal is to create a culture of continuous improvement; one that sees and eliminates waste in real-time.  To get to this point we have to learn habits that enable excellence.  This is why both staff and management need to be developed.

There is very long list of what the staff and management need to know.  At a minimum  everyone should know the 5 principles of improvement and the 7 wastes.  Additionally,  I prefer everyone understand A-3 thinking which is the documentation and thinking used to execute the (PDCA) scientific method.    Finally everyone needs to know the common tools to see and eliminate waste.

Management needs even more skills. In addition to the skills listed above, management needs to understand problem solving using the fish bone diagram and 5 why skills. Management also needs the discipline of following standard work.  They need to hold the staff accountable for their standard work and they need to follow their leadership standard work. Management finally needs some data collection and measurement skills.

This list is not inclusive of all the skills needed, but would be a great place to start.  ? And  by the way for your organization to become competent in this list of skills, you are looking at multiple years. If your organization is not on a track to develop these skills,  you will not see the change needed to overcome the inertia of your current culture.  This is why I recommend you get a Sensei.  Having a single expert in your organization is not even close to sufficient. But hiring someone with the skills and experience to navigate the challenges and issues can be quite beneficial.

Lean Blessings,

Ron

Ron Bercaw
http://www.breakthroughhorizons.com/

Lean Leadership - Pace of Change

Lean Nation,

Continuing on our theme of leadership, I'd like to blog briefly this week about breadth and depth.  By breadth and depth, I'm talking about the focus of improvement within an organization.   Every organization has to make the choice of where to spend the critical improvement resources.    There are always many good opportunities for improvement, but picking the critical few is the responsibility of leadership.

We want the improvements to align with the strategic focus of the organization.  Improving the speed and accuracy of the mail room might be a good improvement project, but I doubt it will help improve your lead-time for products and services, or grow your sales.   But we are trading off that decision with creating a culture of improvement.  The best way to create a culture of improvement is to get everyone involved.

So the decision to go "deep" implies picking a few key value streams within your organization and transforming these value streams consistent with your strategic plans.     The decision to go broad implies using lean thinking in all areas of the organization so everyone can participate.

Leadership has to balance the resources and pace of change in the initial stages of an enterprise wide transformation.  Going too deep at the expense of going deep will shut off the balance of the organization from learning lean thinking.  Going too wide at the expense of going deep will dilute the focus of improvement, slow the actual transformation, and eventually impact the sustainability of the improvements.

Different third party organizations that you may use to help you in your transformation have different views with respect to which is better and which pace to shift from wide to deep or vice versa.  At the end of the day it is the role of leadership, and the steering committee to regulate the pace of change.

While you didn't ask, I always prefer to go deep first, then wide.  Everyone really underestimates the effort it takes to make meaningful change.  And everyone wants to transform really fast.  If I told you transforming your organization was a 20 year journey which model would you pursue first.

Lean Blessings,

Ron

Ron Bercaw
President, Breakthrough Horizons
www.breakthroughhorizons.com

Leadership Behaviors for a Lean Organization, Learn the Tools

Lean Nation,

I have been blogging for a few posts on the leadership behaviors needed to create and sustain a lean enterprise.  This week's post will focus on learning the lean tools.  Now the secret sauce of lean improvement is not in the tools.  Never has been and never will be.  Novice organizations do not understand this and describe lean as a toolkit.  If your organization understands that lean is an entire management system, and not a tool kit, you have just learned the first step. (And an important one at that!)


So why do leaders need to understand the tools?  Lean leadership is abut mentoring and guiding teams toward a culture of improvement.  Your new role is to no longer provide solutions to the teams.  The teams job is generate solutions.  That skill might be what got you into your current role, being a solution provider.  However, that skill is less valued in a lean organization.  Your job now, is to ask questions of your teams to help guide their thinking; to be sure the solutions are based on lean principles,  and to be sure the solutions are fact and time based.

So here is the important lesson.  You will never be able to ask the right questions of the teams, guide their thinking, challenge their understanidng of the current situation, and develop people without first understanding and mastering the lean tools yourself. 

Which tools do you need to master?  Here is a great place to start:

1. flow
2. pull
3. defect free
4. visual management
5. kaizen
6. seeing the 7 wastes
7. takt time
8. time observation
9. loading diagram
10. spaghetti mapping
11. communication circle
12. standard work
13. process control

If you do not undersand improvement at this level,  your organization, despite your best efforts will not likley move beyond the lean as a toolkit stage.   Your guidance will only be superficial and this is where many leaders fail. How do you master these tools?  Toyota would tell you to learn by doing under the guidance of an expereinced Sensei.

Lean Blessings!

Ron

Ron Bercaw
President, Breakthrough Horizons
www.breakthroughhorizons.com

Pay As You Go Results

Lean Nation,

Following our theme of lean leadership, today I will discuss a concept known as pay as you go results. A lean leader needs to make sure that there is organizational alignment between improvement activity and execution of the corporate strategy.   You do not have enough time, resources, or space to waste time on activities that are not going to help you achieve your true north measures.  As a refresher, the true north measures are:

1. staff morale (many times shown as a staff safety measure, but also how you measure staff development)
2. quality (a measure of service quality, process quality, or outcome quality)
3. delivery ( a measure of lead-time or wait time)
4. cost ( a measure of $ per unit of service, or hrs per unit of service)
5. growth ( a measure of volume)

These are the categories that almost all measures roll up into.  They are also the measures that reflect operational excellence.

In addition to the alignment to the true north measures, your improvements better generate a return on their investment.  The collection of all your improvements should have a positive return after all of the improvement related expenses.  These expenses will include the cost of experts (internal and external),  staff costs for the improvement, supplies and incidental expenses associated with the improvements, and any operational and capital expenses spent as a result of the improvements.

This is what is meant by pay as you go results.  After the initial investment in training,  a lean improvement initiative should be self funding.  There should be a business benefit to improvements in staff morale ( less sick time, less turnover), quality (rework $ spent), delivery ( reduction in waiting should result in higher through-put and potentially more sales), and cost savings should be realized.

Many, in fact I'd say most,  organizations fail to achieve the potential of the pay as you go results, because of selecting the wrong measures, budget protection behaviors, failure to hold staff ,technical experts, and management  accountable for following standard work, and frequently an inability to execute the human resource changes needed to realize the savings.

If your improvement program isn't "free",  then I'd look at your measures first, and execution of your improvement activities second.  Lean is designed to create world class improvement in performance and culture.  This should include a healthy ROI.

Lean Blessings,

Ron

Ron Bercaw
www.breakthroughhorizons.com

Empowering your Lean (Kaizen) Teams

Lean Nation;

Following up from last week's lean blog, I want to discuss empowerment this week.  What exactly is Empowerment? Dictionary.com defines empowerment as the following:

"1.to give power or authority to; authorize, especially by legal or official means: I empowered my agent to make the deal for me. The local ordinance empowers the board of health to close unsanitary restaurants.
2.to enable or permit: Wealth empowered him to live a comfortable life. "

For empowerment with respect to improvement teams, I am talking about allowing the teams to make the decisions to change how the work is done,  who is doing it, what the work sequence is, and how long the should take.   As a manager, or the manager of a manager this is extremely scary.  Why would I trust the foxes to make good decisions about the hen house?

As a lean leader, you get to create the conditions under which teams can be empowered.  I encourage organizations to follow three rules before empowering the teams.  First,  leadership defines the measures and the targets for improvement.  It is your responsibility to establish the measures for success and the percentage improvement expected.  For example, reduce the lead time (wait time) for services from two weeks to one week.  Or reduce the hours expended per unit by 25%.  The team's job is to meet the targets.

Second, leadership gets to define the process the teams use to deliver on the goals.  Leadership can require PDCA (plan -do -check-act) thinking documented on an A-3.  For example, the team is required to use the common tools to see and eliminate waste and is required to use the principles of lean thinking to develop solutions.  Additionally, the solution must be managed visually and supported by management standard work.

Thirdly,  management defines the team members to be engaged in creating the improvement.  There are a couple of theories with respect to team make-up.  One theory supports have team members that come from the supplier group, the people that work within the process, and representatives from the customer group.  This ensures that the people/departments in front of the area of focus and downstream of the area of focus are represented on the team.  This prevents waste from being pushed around the system.  We want waste removed from the system not shifted from one area to another.

Another theory involves the rule of 1/3,1/3 and 1/3.  One third of the team should be from the area being improved.  Not just from the area, but the actual people that do that work. The next third, should be the subject matter experts.  Perhaps you have someone that is an expert in clinical practice, or an expert in forging.  The last third should come from somewhere else in the organization.  This group brings "fresh eyes" to the process to help with some out of the box thinking. 

So which one is best?  Both approaches have strengths. For a fine scope, I prefer the latter, and for a larger, broader scoped project I prefer the former.

So let me summarize.  To empower a team, leadership must satisfy three conditions:

1. Select the right measures and targets
2. Use the correct process for the improvement
3. Populate the team with the correct stakeholders (team members)

If you have the correct goals, with the best process, and correct team members,  you can turn the team lose!

I would still encourage you to have periodic meetings to ensure that leadership is removing the barriers that hold the team back.  But you will not need to micro-manage the team and make and approve every change the team wants to put in place.

Empowerment done correctly, simplifies managements life and enables to team to reach its true potential.

Lean Blessings,

Ron

Ron Bercaw
www.breakthroughhorizons.com

Lean Leadership

Lean Nation;

I have mentioned many times that the key to lean improvement, above all other things, is leadership.  James Womack commented in one of his e-newsletters that no enterprise transformational  efforts with the focus and commitment of leadership have ever failed to deliver meaningful results.  That is a pretty powerful statement.

So let's discuss briefly what we mean by lean leadership. 

• Leadership cannot be delegated.  Management can delegated,  but leadership cannot. 
• Leadership, loosely defined is doing the right things.  Management is doing things right.
• Lean leadership is about vision, accountability, and empowerment.

When it comes to leading an organization toward world class rates of improvement, there are several items that need "leading"  The list below is but a few of the topics for leadership:

1. management and staff development
2. improvement areas of focus
3. improvement pace
4. breadth vs depth discussion
5. measurement capture
6. skill building and use of internal and external experts
7. change management approaches
8. pay as you go results
9. demonstrated use of tools
10. organizational design and organizational structure when flow cells and value streams are created
11. dealing with "antibodies"
12. value creating (shop floor or patient care areas versus administrative improvement)
13. governance
14. staff engagement
15. new product/new process development
16. lean HR, lean finance, lean IT, lean supply chain, lean budget, lean marketing, lean strategy development
17. what to do with excess employees
18. sustainability and spread
19. leadership standard work
20. PDCA/A-3 Thinking

I think you get the idea.  If you were going to delegate your improvement, you might consider getting educated on exactly what you are delegating and if the person you are delegating to has the experience these issues horizontally and vertically through the organization.    Because of the need to develop leadership,  I have decided to commit more time to this topic.  Next blog we will talk about how to empower improvement teams. 

Lean blessings,

Ron

Ron Bercaw
http://www.breakthroughhorizons.com/